The newly released State Papers relating to the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s illuminate the multiple difficulties associated with bringing the Troubles to an end. In 1983, the British ambassador in Ireland, Alan Goodison, suggested there was “a raw nerve which never sleeps” in Anglo-Irish relations. A memorandum from that year by Seán Donlon, the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, noted “the inadequacy of the unilateral British approach” to Northern Ireland. He concluded: “if things begin to get radically worse now there is no escape valve as there was in the early seventies when it was possible to appeal over the heads of unionists.”
In 1992 at a meeting in London, Minister for Justice Pádraig Flynn “shouted” at British prime minister John Major about British pressure on Dublin to drop the Irish constitutional claim to Northern Ireland, suggesting unionists derived comfort from such pressure. But Flynn was told by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Patrick Mayhew that unionists “hang on my words because they think I am going to betray them!”
Recognition of the inadequacy of strategies that involved sidelining the protagonists came slowly, and the violence endured. In advance of the IRA ceasefire in 1994, British army morale was at a “low ebb” in Crossmaglen, County Armagh, due to what the Northern Ireland Office called “increasingly sophisticated and threatening IRA mortar attacks”.
The papers also show that there were Garda Síochána intelligence reports on the dominant figures within the IRA leadership, North and South. There were divided views on the efficacy of the broadcasting ban on members and affiliates of paramilitary organisations. The propaganda battles were constant, and paramilitaries consistently exploited tensions “to bolster their position”. There was much understandable doubt 30 years ago about the depth of the commitment to pursuing political aims through peaceful means.
READ MORE
Many of these issues were resolved, at least partially, with recognition that solutions could not be formulated without direct channels of communication, requiring compromises on all sides, some degree of flexibility and soft diplomacy.
The papers from 2005 also document resistance from the British to supplying information to an Irish inquiry into the 1974 bombings in Dublin and Monaghan. Given that in recent weeks legal action has been launched against the Irish State on behalf of some bereaved families over its alleged failure to carry out an “effective investigation” into those bombings, these State papers are clearly relevant to issues that remain contentious and unresolved. Given the consequences of that dark era it remains incumbent on us to understand the depth of the challenges encountered, and the shadows the legacies still cast.
